Re: [Monotone-devel] library build

[Markus Wanner]

Hi,

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> It might make sense to start a new project to rip out our bundled
> libraries altogether and then fix everything necessary to make it work
> with system libraries.

I've started such an effort in nvm.stripped. Beginning with:

 * botan (because I know that from earlier upgrades)
 * pcre (because it was so easy)
 * lua (becasue I'm been afraid of the problems you mentioned)

The m4 scripts for botan and lua are stolen from the library-build build
branch and adjusted. I'm not an m4 hacker, so if some m4 guru could
check those that'd be great.

The branch builds on my debian lenny against botan 1.7.8 (up to head),
pcre 7.6 and lua 5.1 as external libraries. It passes all tests of the
testsuite and weights 30 MiB (vs 37 MiB on mainline and Intel 32bit).

> It also became clear that there are still quite a few hacks that we
> rely on in our local copies of the libraries.  The big one was, we
> compile lua as C++ so its error handling turns into C++ exceptions.  A
> system-provided liblua won't do this.

That certainly needs to be investigated. I'm currently using lua.hpp,
thus including the system provided lua library as C code, yes.

> We don't do error propagation
> across the lua/C++ interface correctly anyway (errors in lua hooks
> have a bad way of just disappearing), so I would *like* to rip that
> out and go back to lua's C interface

Feel free... :-)

I didn't do sha1 benchmarks, but those should now use the assembler
optimized variants.

After just having upgraded (and now landed) monotone's included botan to
1.7.12. Jack is already approaching 1.7.15 with yet another set of
renaming. I'm rather going to use the nvm.stripped branch than continue
to manually upgrade again.

Regards

Markus Wanner